Camping it up with a fascinating new history

Paul Baker’s latest foray into LGBT+ history, following histories of Polari and Section 28, takes a look at Camp! The story of the attitude that conquered the world – and it is both an extremely educative and entertaining read.

As with those two previous books, Baker’s approach is well-researched historically, but also includes autobiographical elements and observations, with a nice side of cheek. Also as previously, this recipe works very well.

 

The first chapter examines the origins of camp as we know it – in particular, its relationship to Louis IX in France.

 

I also had no idea about the origins of the cakewalk and the black balls, and therefore, voguing. Baker covers both these in good fashion. 

 

I’ve seen the Jimmy Cagney film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942 a number of times, but I hadn’t a clue that the lyrics of the eponymous song were originally written in 1755 as a British pop at ragged Americans, who then turned it around.

 

Take these lyrics:

 

“Yankee Doodle went to London,

Riding on a pony,

Stuck a feather in his cap,

And called it macaroni.”

 

Had I ever considered what the pasta reference was actually about? No. But in fact, it was a nickname – and a pejorative one – for young British men who did the Grand Tour and returned with the fashion affectations of, in particular, Italy. Maybe not ‘gay’, but certainly you can see the link to ‘camp’ – and to gay. Fascinating.

 

Taking a leaf out of Baker’s own book, so to speak, there was masses here (particularly in the earlier chapters) that I recognised as tastes from my own earlier years. Agnes Moorehead in Bewitched gets a mention – my absolute favourite character in a show I adored as a child!

 

Paul Lynde was also in Bewitched, but for me, was most memorable and most deliciously enjoyable for his voiceover work on The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (camp in every way imaginable).

 

There are explorations of upper-class British (English) camp – the Mitfords in particular, plus the reach of non-aristo Noël Coward – together with a fascinating introduction to the black cakewalks and balls where voguing was created.

 

But while camp is easy to take as an unserious attitude, Baker illustrates that it is often a way of defiance. And how much more defiant than those at the Stonewall Riots who faced down the police down with a chorus line, singing a revised version of Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, which, while details are not set in concrete, certainly involved black drag queens.

 

There’s a personal educational tip on that note – it also made me realise also why a version of Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay is used, in the way it is, in the film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

 

Of course there are things that are missing here – as Baker acknowledges early on: everyone will have different camp (and campy – ie *knowingly* being camp) faves, but this a really good look at a cultural phenomenon. 

 

Paul Baker’s Camp! Is out now, published by Footnote Press

There are still tickets for an event with the author next week in central London – Bloomsbury, Queerness and Camp. Perfect for Pride Month.

 

 

 

Outrageous! Section 28 as a warning from history

Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker manages to be both a detailed history of the notorious, homophobic legislation and a memoir that is often very funny, recounting how the author grew up under what, before being passed into law, was Clause 28.

It was a badly drafted clause in the Local Government Act in 1988, banning local authorities – which have responsibility for local state schools – from ‘promoting’ homosexuality and the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

That ‘promoting’ bit was a major difficulty – did acknowledging homosexuality exists equate with ‘promotion’? If you played pupils a bit of Tchaikovsky, would that amount to ‘promotion’?

In the House of Commons, Labour MP Tony Benn put it like this: “... if the sense of the word “promote” can be read across from “describe”, every murder play promotes murder, every war play promotes war, every drama involving the eternal triangle promotes adultery; and Mr Richard Branson’s condom campaign promotes fornication. The House had better be very careful before it gives to judges, who come from a narrow section of society, the power to interpret ‘promote’.”

Then of course, there was the whole idea that an LGBT relationship was a ‘pretend’ one. Baker points out that the pace of social change since the 1960s – decriminalisation of homosexuality (albeit with strictures in place) only came in 1967 – had left many older people struggling in such a rapidly shifting landscape and in what many saw as ‘the permissive society’.

The process of how something comes to be on the statue book is explained in a good bit of civics showing how the Westminster Parliament works in terms of both houses.

Baker uses interviews with key figures, including Sir Ian McKellen, Angela Mason and Lord Chris Smith, to recount what happened, together with many quotes from speakers in both the House of Commons and the Lords when the subject was being debated.

Many of those quotes still have the power to shock now, with their brazen and even violent hatred. The usual names come up – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge … together with ones that will be less well known to the wider audience, such as Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman, who was Baker’s MP when he went to work at Lancaster University, and mine too when I lived in that area.

She was a sort of handbagging Margaret Thatcher clone on ’roids – a deeply unpleasant woman that I personally had contact with when writing to her in the 1980s about Campaign for the Arts. It might have been a non-party campaign, but that didn’t stop her snotty reply effectively accusing me of being a ‘loony lefty’. I was barely getting over having started my political life, courtesy of my background, as a Tory, but she helped me further along that road.

Baker takes great care to be as understanding as possible of the motives of many who so strongly backed Section 28 and never falls into the easy trap of simply lambasting him, though is less obviously forgiving of their friends in the media who peddled a diet of hate to their readers.

But central to the book are the stories of those whose lives were negatively affected by Section 28 and the homophobia that it enabled. It had a lasting impact for many.

However, brought together disparate parts of the LGBT community to fight back against and, in the process, build the case – and support for – greater equality, with a campaign including some incredibly inventive, non-violent protests.

Following the repeal of the clause in devolved Scotland in 2000, it finally came off the books elsewhere in 2003.

Reading this today feels like having a premonition.

Toward the end of Outrageous! Baker says that “Tristan Garel-Jones, the deputy chief whip for the Conservatives, apparently called it [Section 28], a piece of meat thrown by Mrs Thatcher to her right-wing wolves”.

I finished the book the same day on which reports leaked out that Tory Party leadership frontrunner Liz Truss had said – according to her supporter and former party leader Iain Duncan Smith – that she regretted her involvement in the Bill to ban conversion ‘therapy’.

Duncan Smith – a Catholic convert who once used the word “sin” in a discussion on unemployment – suggested that she would like to bin the legislation altogether.

This was subsequently denied by her team, according to North London Tory MP Mike Freer, who told his local newspaper that he had asked.

Other reports have suggested that, if elected as Tory leader (and thus prime minister), Truss would also elevate the culture war loving, LGBT+ despising Kemi Badenoch to her front bench.

This is, of course, precisely the sort of raw red meat that Garel-Jones mentioned. The Conservative Party had a maximum membership of 180,000 as of 2019 (the party is not open about its membership) as opposed to 47.6 million Parliamentary electoral registrations in the following year.

Those who will select the new Tory leader/PM are a tiny minority of the electorate as a whole and, on the basis of their likely preferred news reading being the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, they are still being fed a toxic diet of homophobic – and particularly transphobic – bile.

 

The first two of those, together with the Sun, have been cited as the biggest new media defenders of Section 28.

In the last couple of days, Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has stated that schools that talk about gender change could face Ofsted sanctions. Nothing like Section 28 at all, then.

Yet even within this constituency of the Conservative Party membership, YouGov polling has shown that just 8% of those members want “combatting the woke agenda” prioritised, so it’s difficult to see who is being appealed to here. A wider constituency of far-right voters that switched from the likes of UKIP and helped the Conservatives to a massive majority in 2019? Religious fundamentalists from across faiths who hate anything that isn’t heterosexual marriage? Groups that might vote for the Conservatives at the next general election?

 

It’s difficult not to feel deeply concerned about what the coming period will bring in terms of equality and for the LGBT+ community. Or not to feel that, once again, campaigns and protests might need to be organised.

 

Baker’s book is a salutary reminder of the harm of such intolerance – but also of how the fight back can succeed. It is very much worth a read.

• Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker is published by Reaktion Books

 

A bona read!

Fabulosa! The Story of Britain's Secret Gay Language

Paul Baker

Reaktion Books

‘How bona to vada your dolly old eke!’ If you know what this means – or at least recognise something about the words – then a new publication from Reaktion Books might well be for you. If you don’t, then it still might be for you. 

But there is a proviso: Fabulosa! The Story of Britain's Secret Gay Language by Paul Baker will make some people uncomfortable. Polari, a slang that was used predominantly by theatre workers and camp gay men (mostly working class), was not for prudes.

The sentence that opens this post means ‘how nice to see your lovely old face.’ So nothing to worry anyone there.

But here’s another phrase I can remember without making an effort to learn: ‘Scharda there’s nada to vada in the larder’.

Literally, ‘a shame there’s nothing to see in then larder’. Euphemistically: ‘a shame he’s got a small penis’.

It’s a highly sexualised code and full of bitchy potential.

But then, as Baker explains, it was used by people who were outlaws within UK society – derided and persecuted on the basis of who they fancied/had sex with and how they presented. And Polari was not only an incredibly important way to communicate discretely, it also had a sense of in-your-face ‘fuck ’em’ in its bitchiness.

Baker, who has spent 25 years studying his subject, starts this book by carefully explaining the sort of technical stuff about what constitutes a language and, indeed, how Polari developed and from what roots. 

That’s fascinating enough – and it most certainly is – but in many ways, the book really gets into its stride when he starts to look deeper into why it developed: why, indeed, it was needed and what it gave to its users.

Polari has all but died out as a gay language since the end of the 1960s – partly because of decriminalisation (although Baker makes clear that that was far from the magic pill it can sound like now), but that that  also came at the end of its greatest prominence, when used as part of the Julian and Sandy sketches in the classic radio comedy, Round the Horne.

Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were the eponymous pair: Baker interviewed co-writer Barry Took late in the latter’s life, and Took makes clear that the duo were the ones who knew Polari and fed that into the sketches. Took was apparently also rather shocked at some of the (possible) double, double meanings Williams in particular seems to have contributed, not least via ad-libbing.

But that actually emphasis how playful Polari was … how playful it IS.

One of the gay-friendly pubs in London, from the first half of the 20th century, that Baker mentions in the book – the Royal Oak on Columbia Road – was the first place I heard Polari: drinking with gay men who rattled off bits of Julian and Sandy as late as the 1990s.

I’ve long loved the camp bitchy thing – Priscilla, Queen of the Desert remains a favourite film, as does Victor/Victoria (even if the latter is not quite so camp bitchy). I don’t generally do personal ‘pride’ in much – but I do remain bloody chuffed with a couple of times I set the Oak crowd roaring with a comment.

Fabulosa! is an easy read – in places, very, very funny. But it is also a welcome social history that is a reminder of what gay men in the UK faced.

Very much recommended.